Note 64 — Chapter XXV · THE WALK

‘Much have those travellers to answer for, whose casual intercourse with this innocent and simple people tends to corrupt them: disseminating among them ideas of extravagance and dissipation—giving them a taste for pleasures and gratifications of which they had no ideas—inspiring them with discontent at home—and tainting their rough industrious manners with idleness and a thirst after dishonest means.

‘If travellers would frequent this country with a view to examine its grandeur and beauty, or to explore its varied and curious regions with the eye of philosophy—if, in their passage through it, they could be content with such fare as the country produces, or at least reconcile themselves to it by manly exercise and fatigue (for there is a time when the stomach and the plainest food will be found in perfect harmony)—if they could thus, instead of corrupting the manners of an innocent people, learn to amend their own, by seeing in how narrow a compass the wants of human life may be compressed—a journey through these wild scenes might be attended, perhaps, with more improvement than a journey to Rome or Paris. Where manners are polished into vicious refinement, simplifying is the best mode of improving; and the example of innocence is a more instructive lesson than any that can be taught by artists and literati.

‘But these parts are too often the resort of gay company, who are under no impressions of this kind—who have no ideas but of extending the sphere of their amusements, or of varying a life of dissipation. The grandeur of the country is not taken into the question, or at least it is not otherwise considered than as affording some new mode of pleasurable enjoyment. Thus, even the diversions of Newmarket are introduced—diversions, one would imagine, more foreign to the nature of this country than any other. A number of horses are carried into the middle of the lake in a flat boat: a plug is drawn from the bottom: the boat sinks, and the horses are left floating on the surface. In different directions they make to land, and the horse which arrives soonest secures the prize.’—Gilpin’s Picturesque Observations on Cumberland and Westmoreland, vol. ii. p. 67.